Class, gender, and the making of the criminological subject in mid-Victorian fiction

Over the course of the nineteenth century, criminal justice discourse shifted from a primary focus on the crime to a focus on the criminal as "a dangerous individual," to use Foucault's phrase. As revisionist histories have suggested, this shift did not simply result from an Enlightenment humanitarianism. Such larger cultural forces as the emergence of the human sciences, changing attitudes toward the poor, and a perceived need for increased social control contributed to the development of what I call "the criminological subject," an individual whose criminality has been determined by gender and physiology, to the disavowal of class-based causes. As a result of this outcome, British criminology long neglected consideration of social causes' contributions to crime and generally repudiated welfarist policies in its mitigation.;Surprisingly, in fiction this trend first appears in the reform-minded novels of two mid-Victorian authors who espoused public programs to improve the lower class's living conditions. Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's Hard Times, in the process of refuting the widely held opinion that the working class was criminally predisposed, associate criminality with individual moral weakness and thereby obscure the extent to which poverty appears to influence crime. Greater individualization of the criminal manifests in the mapping of criminality onto gender performance in Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm. By linking compliance with gender norms with obedience to the law, Orley Farm promotes a characterological conception of crime while simultaneously laying the foundation for isolating criminality in the sexed body.;As the developing sciences become increasingly positivist in orientation, Victorian fiction locates criminality in sexually defective physiology. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel, Lady Audley's Secret, the narrative begins by suggesting women by nature are predisposed to be criminal, but ultimately narrows criminality to a very particular type of femininity in conjunction with puerperal mania, specific to female physiology and generally passed on from mother to daughter. Nor is this connection limited to women. In the nearly twenty years that encompasses the publication of Dickens's short story, "Hunted Down," Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, and Trollope's Cousin Henry, we see effeminate criminality as increasingly inalienable and apparently physiological.